Response to Carr

Although it would be like having a “magic” book, I don’t think that it is a good idea to mess with books as we do other digital media. I like to be able to read books as the author intended them, even if they don’t write in the style that I most enjoy. I think the ability to change the contents of a book based on analysis of reader reaction will cause the books to end up reading the same way. I think they would lose originality even more so than today where story plots are passed around frequently. On the upside though, I would never have to buy another book if enough authors decided to keep tweaking their books (of course they may start losing money over that). I think that textbooks would be too easy to abuse. People could erase importantevents if they wanted to or they could easily switch a book back and forth so that parents wouldn’t really know what their children were learning. It could become hard to trust books in the same way that we can’t always trust pictures today. I think that it is important to keep our books from becoming unstable. It would become a big problem if our primary sources became unreliable.